70 Willow Street and 31 Grace Court

The history of 70 Willow Street is particularly illustrative of the Heights' evolving social character. Originally built in 1839 by Adrian Van Sinderen, the massive 11-bedroom, 9,000-square-foot Greek Revival mansion hosted high-society events for decades. In 1894, under the ownership of Mrs. William A. Putnam, it became the meeting place for an anti-suffragist group that argued voting would deprive women of "special privileges". By 1953, the home was purchased by legendary Broadway set designer Oliver Smith, who rented the basement garden apartment to Truman Capote from 1955 to 1965. It was in this opulent setting that Capote penned Breakfast at Tiffany's and read the 1959 news article about a murdered Kansas family that inspired In Cold Blood, famously declaring his affection for the borough in his essay Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir with the quote, "I live in Brooklyn. By choice".^52,87,81

I live in Brooklyn. By choice

However, it is the provenance of 31 Grace Court that offers the most striking third-order insight into the political pressures facing American intellectuals during the Cold War. In the late 1940s, the playwright Arthur Miller occupied the townhouse, channeling his working-class Brooklyn background (having grown up in Midwood) into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. By 1951, as the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism mounted—a movement that would eventually target Miller directly—he sold the property to the 83-year-old sociologist and civil rights titan W.E.B. Du Bois, and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois.^72,83

Du Bois's decade at 31 Grace Court represents a poignant, often overlooked chapter of his life. During his time in Brooklyn Heights, the U.S. government subjected Du Bois to intense federal investigation for his socialist sympathies and anti-nuclear proliferation activism. Miller sold the house to Du Bois just as the scholar faced a highly publicized federal trial (charges were ultimately dismissed after defense attorneys noted that Albert Einstein had offered to serve as a character witness for Du Bois).^85,83

While residing at Grace Court, Du Bois penned the Black Flame trilogy, an ambitious but unwieldy series of novels attempting to synthesize his life's sociological work into historical fiction, heavily influenced by his wife Shirley. Despite the serenity of the neighborhood, the geopolitical implications of Du Bois's residency were immense; foreign diplomats routinely visited the townhouse, prompting the U.S. State Department to declare 31 Grace Court officially off-limits to United Nations delegations from adversarial nations. Alienated by his treatment and feeling increasingly disconnected from the younger generations of the civil rights struggle, Du Bois left Brooklyn—and the United States—in 1961 for Ghana, where he died in 1963. The transfer of 31 Grace Court from Miller to Du Bois encapsulates the neighborhood's dual function: it was both a quiet aesthetic haven for literary production and a besieged fortress for America's most persecuted intellectual dissidents.^86,83,84